Feds to cover emergency Medicare prescriptions

January 25, 2006|Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- States will be "fully reimbursed" for hundreds of thousands of emergency prescriptions for seniors who ran into trouble with the new Medicare drug benefit, top federal officials said Tuesday. The promise was part of a seven-point plan by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to try to resolve the continuing frustration faced by many patients and pharmacists since the benefit took effect three weeks ago. Leavitt's announcement marked the first time such a senior official publicly acknowledged the need to fix the broad range of problems. It came a week before President Bush is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union message, in which the president, despite the glitches, is expected to hail the benefit as a significant accomplishment and a foundation for market-oriented health care reforms. Launched Jan. 1, the program offers 43 million Medicare beneficiaries the opportunity to enroll in private insurance plans offering government-subsidized coverage for their outpatient prescriptions. But its complicated design appears to have dampened enthusiasm among seniors, and many low-income beneficiaries who were automatically enrolled in the program have encountered a host of unintended coverage problems, leading some to leave the pharmacy without needed medicines.